The NSA Fiasco: A Carefully Choreographed Stage Show

One of the less-remembered parts of the Osama bin Laden fairytale was that the NSA had a hard time keeping track of his communications with his Al CIAda operatives. Why? Because, as General Michael Hayden told CBS News back in early 2001, bin Laden used standard encryption and off-the-shelf American telecommunication products.

Sound unbelievable? That’s because it is. As they go on to admit in that very same report, they were tracking bin Laden’s satellite phone after all, and as James Bamford and others have described in exhaustive detail, the NSA was monitoring Al Qaeda’s “communications hub” in Yemen for years prior to 9/11, and purposefullly withholding most of that information from the CIA bin Laden unit. But the idea that the NSA just wasn’t able to track bin Laden because of his dastardly technology was a key meme for the NSA to implant in the immediate wake of 9/11. That’s why the Hayden interview was replayed on CBS less than 48 hours after the attacks, and that’s why, as recently declassified documents show, the NSA used 9/11 as an official talking point to justify their illegal surveillance of Americans.

This meme, of course, was a lie. As NSA insiders have pointed out for years, most if not all of the current illegal collections programs began before 9/11, but the false flag events of September 11th provided the perfect justification for the revelation and expansion of those programs.

Now, over a decade later, that meme is paying off. Just two weeks after a federal district court judge ruled the NSA’s collection of telephone metadata unconstitutional, a different district court judge ruled it constitutional. In his particularly florid ruling, U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley wrote:

“The September 11th terrorist attacks revealed, in the starkest terms, just how dangerous and interconnected the world is. While Americans depended on technology for the conveniences of modernity, al-Qaeda plotted in a seventh-century milieu to use that technology against us. It was a bold jujitsu. And it succeeded because conventional intelligence gathering could not detect diffuse filaments connecting al-Qaeda.”

No matter if it bears any resemblence to reality. The meme has been planted and the courts are willing to go along with it. It is now official lore that the NSA needs to spy on everyone’s phone metadata to prevent the next 9/11 from taking place.